Workshop on Physical Analytics (June 16, 2014)

NEW: Registration discount for students: Thanks to generous support from Microsoft Research, we are in a position to offer a 50% registration discount to several students. Interested students should email physicalanalytics2014-chairs@yahoogroups.comby 5:00 pm PDT (UTC-7) on April 30 May 8, 2014 with a brief note, no longer than 100 words, stating what they are working on and why they should be at the workshop.

Despite the rapid rise in online
activity, people lead much of their lives in the physical world. They travel to
places, dwell at various locations, spend time with other people, shop, go to
the gym, watch movies, and listen to music or are exposed to announcements, all
of which is often based on what interests them. Therefore, there is much to be
learnt about users from their physical actions and activities, which is often not manifested in their online activity.
Such insights can be of benefit both
to users directly and to businesses. For instance, a user could benefit from
having a digital health diary automatically keep track of their food purchases
and sleep patterns, or a digital personal assistant that melds together
physical signals with online signals. A business such as a retail store could
learn about the browsing habits of users while in their store, while an advertising
network could stitch together information from user visits to multiple stores on
a visit to the mall to perform more effective targeting.

While huge strides have been made
in online analytics to extract a wealth of information from peoples’ online
activities, corresponding work in the physical context — which we term as
Physical Analytics — is relatively nascent and scattered. The goal of the
proposed workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners to have a
conversation on Physical Analytics, with a view to coalescing a research agenda
for the community. Our intention is keep the scope broad — spanning devices, algorithms,
systems, applications, and policy — yet have the discourse be focused on
physical analytics. So, for instance, within the scope of the workshop would be
such topics as sensing, localization, wearable devices, cloud computing, data
analytics, privacy, and more. However, rather than discussing the advances in
these topics in isolation, the goal would be to focus on users, what we can
learn about them, the algorithmic and systems issues involved in gleaning
useful information, and how the resulting insights can be used for the benefit
of users and businesses. Perspectives on how to balance the interests of users
with those of businesses, the related economic issues, and what lessons the
experience from online analytics holds for physical analytics, would also be
welcome. However, much-studied problem areas such as sensor networks for
monitoring the physical environment and big-data infrastructure, while
certainly important, would not be in scope, unless a clear connection is made
to user-centric physical analytics.

We seek papers that report on
work in progress, present an insightful survey of the state of the art, or lay
out a compelling research agenda for the community, on all aspects of Physical
Analytics, including devices, algorithms, systems, applications, and policy. The
papers will be limited to 6 pages in length in the standard ACM format.

Submission Instructions

All submissions must follow strictly the guidelines indicated below (adapted from the guidelines for the MobiSys 2014 conference).

Your submission must be in PDF. We will not accept the papers in any other format.

Your submission must use a 10pt font (or larger) and be correctly formatted for printing on Letter-sized (8.5" by 11") paper. Paper text blocks must follow ACM guidelines: double-column, with each column 9.25" by 3.33", 0.33" space between columns and single-spaced. If correctly formatted, this means that no page column will have more than 55 lines of text.

Submissions MUST be no more than six (6) pages. This length includes everything: figures, tables, references, appendices and so forth.

Provide an abstract of fewer than 1000 characters.

The first page of each paper should include the names and affiliations of the authors, i.e., the submissions should not be anonymous.